Shintō-musō-ryū Jō No Hinkaku: The Dignity of the Jō

An Interview of Hamaji Koichi by Gerald Toff

Translated by Matuoka Hiroshi & Edited by Russ Ebert, Published by Aijokai

These days, people have marvelous opportunities to study living martial traditions all over the world. Beyond those who’ve studied the ‘usual,’ among my personal acquaintances are people who have studied with teachers of authentic lineages of: Bökh (Mongolian wrestling); Esgrima con Machete (Venezuelan & Columbian machete fencing); Fllyssa (Amazigh [Berber] sword); Italian stiletto; Portugeuse jogo do pau (staff fighting); Nguni (Zulu stick-fighting) – just to name a few of many martial traditions outside the usually assumed limits of East Asia.

Some of their foreign-to-the-culture students achieve very high levels, even become licensed as teachers. In my observation, however, despite many who have achieved excellence in the physical attributes of the art, most fall short at the essential level. [1] Using Japanese koryū as an example, all too many crassly ignore or discard essential qualities intrinsic to the art—eliminating such things as reishiki (poorly translated as ‘etiquette’), social hierarchy, or the instructor’s absolute authority. [By the way, that most modern Japanese are ‘foreign’ to the traditions as well. What I write of non-Japanese applies all-to-often to Japanese nationals too, but my main focus will be on foreign practitioners of traditional arts, for whom the book I review here is so important].

It is hard for non-Japanese to grasp, for example, that part of one’s training in a traditional martial art is that knowledge may be unexplained, withheld or even never taught to you, no matter how dedicated you may be. Nothing, including your merits, entitles you to anything. Whether they manifest it or hold it inside, some students are demanding, petulant, belligerent, argumentative or otherwise ‘modern;’  however, the culture they claim to wish to enter is, to this day, feudal in nature. What you should offer is loyalty to a teacher and to a tradition. What you receive is what the teacher believes best suits the tradition. Complicating this, the teacher is perhaps a flawed human being, who may not treat you well, and may actually act counter to what is genuinely the best interests of the ryūha. According to the logic of the culture you have joined, your option, by tradition, was to either accept the injustice, quit or in the extreme, protest by seppuku. In the case of quitting, there would be social repercussions were one simply to withdraw, and if you were to set up a new ryūha, you were proclaiming your superiority and certainly opened yourself up to challenges, not only from your former brothers-in-arms, but also from those of other systems. And as for the last, seppuku: yes, that was unlikely even in the middle ages, and would be regarded as insanity today, but I’ve chosen the apocalyptic example to underscore that koryū do not run by Western democratic values, and we humans are NOT all the same under the skin.

Conversely, however, others indulge in live-action-role play. Playing dress-up, however, is not welcome either. As one traditional instructor told me, “I didn’t invite foreigners into my ryūha just to have them ape what we do. If you try to be ‘more Japanese’ than us, that will only make everyone uncomfortable. And then when you inevitably do something wrong, half the dojo will be angry at you, thinking you did it deliberately and the other half will be really satisfied that you’ve fallen on your face.” When someone chooses to live on another people’s ground, it is easy to fail, either walking on eggs or simply stomping on them without even realizing what you are smashing. [2] Those who created these arts did so out of an unconscious cultural vision, natural to them, that is both narrow and deep – its limits are the way the culture conceived the world and the people within it;  its depths are as deep as a soul can reach. Without a shared worldview, however, one will never find the entrance-way to plumb those depths.

An example: an acquaintance of mine studied capoeira angola in Bahia, Brazil. Many years ago, during the time that I knew him, he had achieved the rank of contra-mestre. Bahia is the nexus of Afro-Brazilian culture , and Brazil has a history of black-white relations that is different in many respects from that of North America. Slavery was equally horrific, but one significant difference was that due to the geography, and the distribution of population, Africans successfully carried out a number of revolts, creating freeholds (quilombo). Furthermore, for innumerable reasons, interactions within the Afro-Brazilian community are different in many respects than that within the African-American community. Capoeira angola was born in the collision of African martial practices and culture with the conditions of slaves, maroons, and urban Afro-Brazilians. Today, when martial arts are seen through a lens of mixed martial arts (MMA), capoeira is viewed by most as a folkloric practice, beautiful to watch, but impractical in the ring. Among the techniques in classic capoeira angola is one called ‘closing the door.’ One of the participants, in the middle of the swirl of kicks, trips, traps and headstands, will suddenly pose, stock-still, feet together and arms outstretched like a human crucifix. His/her opponent will link hands in a similar pose, crouch with an x-block at the other’s legs, or touch them lightly from behind. They will then slowly dance, matching steps, back-and-forth. Without apparent warning, one or the other will disengage and whirl into a kick or trip and the action resumes as before. My acquaintance regarded this technique as part of the capoeira game, something that the traditionalists maintained, he supposed, as an integration of dance incorporated within the martial art. One night he was socializing (AKA drinking) with a group of older mestre and they began talking about the recent death of one of their friends. He had a termagant of a wife, who found fault with anything and everything, and she would wake the neighborhood with her loud yells, breaking dishes and slamming things around. One neighbor, sleep-deprived one night too long, hammered on the door. The beleaguered mestre opened the door and the neighbor, expecting the wife, fired a pistol (anything to shut her up!), and shot the man in the head. The story-teller concluded by saying, “He would never practice ‘closing the door.’” And they all cracked up, laughing their heads off. Along with the ‘revelation’ of the meaning of the technique, a psychological preparation for such a life, my acquaintance realized, for the first time, that he was in a world that saw violence and friendship very differently from his own, as he sat, surrounded by their laughter, the same laughter that would greet his demise were he not to pay attention to the lessons he should be learning. In other words, every move and moment of a martial art is a code of behavior that makes sense within a cultural matrix. It’s far more than the techniques. Context is all.

Which brings me to Jō no Hinkaku. In 1977, Shintō-musō-ryū practitioner Gerald Toff interviewed Hamaji Koichi, a menkyo-kaiden in the art. This interview was turned into a book, only forty-one pages, first in Japanese and now in English, one I consider to be the single most important work for anyone interested in koryū bugei.  Why do I consider this book so important when we have works as erudite as David Hall’s, The Buddhist Goddess Marishiten: A Study of the Evolution and Impact of her Cult on the Japanese Warrior, Karl Friday and Fumitake Seki’s Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima-Shinryu and Samurai Martial Culture, or Donn Draeger’s three volume, Martial Arts and Ways of Japan, to name only a few? The reason is that these books give the reader everything except that which is most important: the experience of hearing – truly – the mind of someone who lived koryū bugei as it was in a past era. Hamaji sensei hearkens back to the time of his father and grandfather, describing a mindset largely gone from the world today. And without somehow internalizing that mindset, you will never understand a traditional cultural practice, be it a combative art or an aesthetic one.

Describing the tutelage of his father and grandfather’s era, Hamaji says, “In light of the way Jōdō is practiced today, I think students must first have fundamental training.” At this point, the modern reader probably expects an iteration of the ‘true cliché:’ [Practice Fundamentals!] But Hamaji continues: “What kind of training do you think a little boy old enough to ride piggyback had in the old days? His father would take him to a grave mound where decapitated heads were publicly displayed. He would lull his son with those heads instead of toys This was his way of introducing Jōdō.” Like the laughter that greeted the death of the unfortunate capoeira mestre who didn’t know how to keep his door closed, this statement knocks us off balance, and into a world quite different from our own, one where some individuals, sentenced to death, were buried with just their head exposed, and passerby’s could pick up a serrated saw of bamboo placed nearby and cut a few strokes into his neck.

It is not relevant, really, if carrying your child to an execution ground to play with decapitated heads was unusual amongst bushi of the time, or this was something Hamaji sensei’s grandfather came up with on his own, because even families who didn’t subject their child to what, from our perspective, was horrible, would ‘get it.’ No one would regard this as emotional abuse. Why this severity? Because budō really was about life-and-death, not a hypothetical mental construct associated with clacking sticks together. (The majority of what is called kenjutsu today is really bokkenjutsu – not only are people not truly intending to train to cut and stab people to death, showering themselves in a spray of arterial blood; they are using their training implements in such a way that they wouldn’t be very effective at it either). How you cut with a sword or strike with a stick is different if you are a man who played with decapitated heads while a child. . . or were brought up by a man who did.

Hamaji states critically is that today people train for their mind and spirit, but in older times, people trained to actually defend their lives and country. Or put another way, they trained to kill. Budō, however, is not merely killing. It was developed as a systemization of activities to create  a man (or woman) of the Edo period, one suited to a ferociously repressed totalitarian peace. Hamaji emphasizes how each detail in the kata, including rituals that are part of them, are essential so that one is imbued with the ryūha. Furthermore, as he wrote, “…when you were learning Jōdō from Shimizu Sensei on one-on-one level, his whole character entered your body.” The point of this phrase is that what most people are doing today is NOT koryū bugei. True practice requires one to be ‘infected’ by one’s teacher, and by the ryū itself.  If you leave portions of training out, you will not ‘become’ the tradition, you will merely be ‘enacting’ it. Hamaji states: “I am sorry that today’s students are learning Jōdō only to fulfill themselves. They should think of the selfless spirit of Jōdō-ka (Jōdō practitioners) had in those days. They should understand what Jōdō-ka were thinking when they were practicing Jōdō in the past.”

Given the brevity of this book, I do not want to write too much, in case the reader of this review will assume that they can ‘get’ the essentials here, and therefore, do not have to purchase the book;  therefore, I will not write much more of the substance of the text. Suffice it to say that after the small and powerful interview, there is Hamaji’s commentary on thirteen core principles of jō practice (similar precepts which you will surely find in any koryū bugei curriculum). Let us simply consider one of the maxims Hamaji cites, in the light of this archaic mindset I refer to:

One’s jo is merely a piece of wood

One cannot cut or stab with it

Therefore, never forget this:

“Strike and thrust”

Of this, Hamaji sensei merely writes two sentences, the second of which is: “It means that one must perfect techniques so that one can strike and thrust simultaneously.”

 Quite honestly, I can well imagine the reader taking this in and thinking, “Yeah, I get that. My school says something similar.” Consider however, if you were once a child who played with the heads of decapitated men. You would know, first hand, the devastating power of a sword. By all rights, every time even a wooden training sword  came close to your flesh, your skin should curl away in fear and horror. And remember,  you would be using a mere stick against such a weapon. To you, “strike and thrust” means that your single technique must render the swordsman utterly incapacitated or dead, hopefully wreaking the same kind of damage that one sees in a video of the impact of a hollow-core bullet. Because if you did not succeed, you would be slaughtered like a sheep.

For whatever reasons, we, readers and writer both, are fascinated by archaic systems of combat, martial traditions that encode the worldview – no the ‘worldsense’ – of men and women no longer in existence. If our practice is not just a more virile version of Morris Dancing or a mere role-play of combative techniques long abandoned, we must, through practice, enter into their minds and bodies. Jo no Hinkaku, as much as anything I’ve read, offers some insights from a man who did.

[1] I do not mean the people I have referenced above, however. These are men who successfully negotiated this dilemma.

[2] For those interested in the ‘mechanics’ of how I personally negotiated this dilemma, see Hubal and Amdur’s The Coordinator: Managing High-Risk High-Consequence Social Interactions in an Unfamiliar Environment]

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